Meet Ben Bator, co-founder of TextsFromLastNight.com.

(813): He invited me to see “Alison Wonderland.” WHAT THE FUCK THATS NOT A FIRST NAME/LAST NAME TYPE DEAL

It’s funny, right? And it’s one of many that people laugh at every day while perusing textsfromlastnight.com. Now, meet co-founder Ben Bator: 24 years old, ridiculously bright and incredibly lucky. Check out how, in just over a year, he’s created a site that gets millions of hits per day, published a new book and begun developing a tv show. (I know, right? Insane.)

ME: Tell me about starting the site.

BEN BATOR: [Co-founder] Lauren [Leto] and I were kind of, I guess, bored. Lauren was in law school I had applied to law school and I found out I got in, so I was basically comfortably unemployed. And our friends had all moved off to Chicago or were still in school or in LA or whatever and they’re pretty much really willing to make it obvious that they were having more fun than we were. So we’d wake up to these ridiculous text messages from all of our friends and that’s kind of the way it started was just, instead of forwarding them to each other—to  our friends, we just got tired of it and we ended up putting them online in this random blog. We never saw it going this big. We’d go around to our friends and steal their phones and post the funny text messages… we used gmail for submissions… and we would get random submissions from a few other area codes and that’s when e decided to redesign the site. When we did that, they could text in—they could do it, they could copy and paste it to the site and that’s when it blew up.

ME: How long did all of this take?

BB: We started at the end of February and by May 1, was when we had our total went to a million hits. May 1 we had 400,000 hits. And now we get just under 5 million a day.

ME: I know you’re monetizing at least in part with a book. When did that happen?

BB: The book happened, it was all at the same time. On May 1 was pretty much when every book publisher called and said, ‘We’d love to make a book.’  That was when New York magazine came out and  also it kind of bounced around the internet on May 1. That’s when people started to pay attention to it and we kind of stepped back and we ended up signing with an agent, Erin Malone, out of William Morris/Endeavor and we ended up selling the book to Gotham, a Penguin imprint. It just kind of happened…we had a few ideas for the boo—we didn’t have on in particular—and  we put the book together and it’s out now. So the t-shirts, it was just kind of one of those things where we thought this would be a cool idea and we had a means to do it ourselves… we ended up having a few connections just from college and our families that were able to set us up with everything we needed… we’re pretty happy with that and it’s worked really nicely, especially during the holidays. Christmas was crazy with shirts. It was pretty fun.

ME: How many submissions do you get per day?

BB: Right around 15,000 a day. It depends on what day. The craziest so far was the day after Halloween, we had close to 30,000 on Halloween. And then New Year’s Day was similar. And Valentine’s Day actually pretty similar too.

ME: How do you pick what goes up on the site?

BB: We look at we see so many of them, the real criteria is whether or not it can be believable. It’s hard to judge because it’s out of context and nothing sounds real, but at the same time, just going by college experiences and almost anything’s possible, so you kind of look at it like that. We look at things that are somewhere releatable and humorous and don’t really require a back-story other than the text itself. …There are some we look at and—a lot of different body humor we don’t really like. We’ve put a few of them [up] but there are a few of them that we don’t really touch. Occasionally, occasionally we let a few sneak by that are more risqué than usual. It depends on the way that it’s framed and the text, a lot of times, if it’s something that can be taken two very different way and one way is very, very, very bad and the other is funny/harmless, those we’ll almost save for other things, like possibly the next book if that happens. We don’t know but if it does, we have a list ready. On a site, comments would be negative, but in a book you can’t comment. It would be funny then. It’s a really big grey area.

ME: So are you both doing this full-time? Not going to law school, I take it?

BB: Both of us are actually doing this full-time. Didn’t have time for both, fortunately I guess!

ME: How did it spread so quickly?

BB: I told my friends when we first started it, and a few people passed it around Facebook. It was just kind of a joke with our friends and the great thing about Facebook, when you can make it your status and people can comment in on it—a friend made it her status and someone commented, ‘I smell a book deal.’  And I remember thinking, ‘That would be awesome’… and then it happened and we thought, ‘We should do an iPhone app, we should do this.’ When people say, ‘What are you gonna do next, what’s your next project?’ this is still our next project. There are still a lot of things we’re working on.

ME: Like what?

BB: We’re working on at TV show. But we can’t talk too much about it. It’s still in development and the writers are still finishing up a few things. We can’t get into it, but it’s really funny.

ME: Tell me more about the book—how’d you pick your publisher?

BB: As far as the book was concerned, we looked for the people connected to it that we really felt comfortable with… and kind of had the best dialogue with them. We met with Patrick and Gotham, it felt like this, this is someone we can work with… we could kind of pitch a few different ideas. We had three different ideas for the first book, we can still hopefully use one or both of the others for other books .

ME: So how else do you monetize?

BB: What’s funny is, we were pretty much a website that also had an iPhone app for awhile. The iPhone app was how we were able to monetize, and we were able to avoid going the venture capital route, because even though we were big and we had huge server costs and development costs, a lot of people bought the iPhone app and that was able to keep the site going. … That’s why we we really take that seriously and why we’re developing an Android app because we realize that’s a major player too. Advertising came later. We had no ads on the site for the first three months we were up. We didn’t have any till the end of June, and that’s when we were getting almost 2 million hits per day at this point. We were getting a lot of traffic and we were monetizing it more, we weren’t really monetizing anything at that point. We had ads on the site in June, but you don’t get paid off on the bigger campaigns for the standard and agency period, so we didn’t have anything coming in until the iPhone app happened in August.
ME: Was its first incarnation on Blogger, Tumblr…?

BB: It was on Blogger. When you look back a year ago with what these sites are, there was no Tumblr so it wouldn’t be that easy to push a button and you had a beautiful Tumblr blog. … We started on Blogger [in February 2009] and … [later] we had someone develop a platform for textsfromlastnight. … The new platform was launched, the updated platform was launched on April 20. May 1^st was the day it really hit.

ME: And it just went viral. That’s amazing.

BB: It was funny, I was an advertising major at MSU… I remember thinking, ‘You can’t just make [something go viral].’ It just kind of did through the channels that were out there. May 1^st in colleges is finals week. A bunch of students are crammed into libraries and likely on Facebook. If ten people made it their statuses and they had 500 friends, 500 people would see it in the library. It was perfect timing for it take off and it did. We didn’t realize it until a few days after—we were trying to figure out how the numbers were happening and how it made sense. We went into Google analytics awe could almost trace the traffic to a ton of the traffic to the MSU library, which is funny to think about like that.

ME: Do you and Lauren have different skill sets?

BB: She’s more of an editorial person—I’m the first to say I’m on that business savvy in a traditional sense, but we both share a similar philosophy of how the site should grow. We really went into this with the mindset of, it’s ok to say no to a few things. … that’s one of the things we balance each other well on. We were really able to pick the right things to get involved with. We said no to just a few early offers to syndicate the content in different forms, like cartoons and stuff like that, we definitely said no to book publishers the first time around, we said, ‘We hold on.’

ME: Have there been challenges?

BB: There have definitely been challenges. I think the biggest challenges are—learning a new space really quickly. We didn’t really know anything about how servers work and how expensive they were and the value of having developers on full-time and how hard it was to find the right graphic designers. There is kind of this misconception with the internet as far as, this vast, free land of whatever you care to find. It’s true to a certain point but for us it quickly became—we really needed a way to expand and be able to track what was going on, so we had to really learn quickly what to do and how to make decisions on the fly with stuff we didn’t necessarily understand at the time. That was kind of the biggest hurdle early on.  And now the hurdle is deciding the best ways to maximize the experience for ours users and make it so they can do pretty much whatever they want with the information but in a way where we don’t lose the copyright over it. We don’t want it to get lost to the point where people are making a lot with our stuff.

ME: Are you still making the t-shirts yourselves?

BB: No, no, we actually never did. The t-shirts—we had friends in that industry. My cousin’s in promotional marketing and they have contacts—factories where they can do it rather than going through site where we’re paying a certain amount to keep their lights on as well.

ME: Do you have employees now?

BB: We do, we hired my brother t o help us with editorial management. He goes through most of the text message every day and Lauren goes through a bunch of them as well and occasionally I do as well but I’m more on the business side of things. We have a developer full time, who’s a friend of mine who’s in med school, he’s deceivingly on it… we update our app more than most of the CNNs of the world! And then—we are looking, slowly expanding so we can take on a few more projects with what we’re doing.

ME: Any tips for other people looking o do what you did?

BB: With people doing things on the Internet, a great idea ill get you far but if everything isn’t executed to a tee, it’s almost pointless. This isn’t by any means, I can’t take credit for this, there’s a Jason Fried quote… his motto is, ‘Do half, not half-assed.’ Instead of taking a million things cut what you’re doing down to the basic and that’s why we’re here. We  focused on making the content as easy to share—the quality was there-but the way we packaged it was very calculated as far as making it as easy as possible to share with people and make it so it was undeniable that it came from textfromlastnight. Execution is definitely key. And the other advice is when you’re launching it, whatever you can use that’s free—now  Tumblr’s out—you can make a really easy and amazing page on Tumblr. … If we had had Tumblr it would have been amazing a year ago. Other than that, just—the other real thing is juts be aware of what other applications are out there, and think of how you can use them.

ME: Plus, you relied on your life experience for an idea—that’s kind of cool.

BB: Not everything needs to change the world immediately but it’s nice if it does! I think we did everything backwards. Don’t worry about how things happen as long as you’re able to meet the demands of what’s happening. That’s really key.

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